With apolo­gies to Obi-​​Wan Kenobi for the title…

Pub­lic aware­ness and momen­tum against the issue of the Fed­eral Government’s pro­posed clean feed appears to be grow­ing apace. Now we have the inter­na­tional news mag­a­zine, TIME, report­ing on it in none too glow­ing terms:

Ini­tially, the min­is­ter for com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Stephen Con­roy, denied that the list on Wik­ileaks and the ACMA black­list are the same, a denial that rang a lit­tle hol­low when one of its part­ners, the Inter­net Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion (IIA), pub­licly con­demned the release and post­ing of the list. “No rea­son­able per­son could coun­te­nance the pub­li­ca­tion of links which pro­mote access to child abuse images, irre­spec­tive of their moti­va­tion, which in this case appears to be polit­i­cal,” said IIA chief exec­u­tive Peter Coroneos.

Against all the best advice, the gov­ern­ment per­pet­u­ates the move to, at the very least, waste tax­payer dol­lars on prov­ing the unwork­able­ness of the clean feed.

It would be much smarter if the gov­ern­ment sim­ply admit­ted this wasn’t going to work in the way it’s being couched and returned to their pre­vi­ous, work­able pol­icy, of an opt-​​in fil­tered feed that could be requested by con­sumers should they wish it. Doing this would, in all like­li­hood, sat­isfy both sides of the argu­ment — those whose view of the world has them wor­ried about their kids see­ing unto­ward mate­r­ial on the ‘net (soon they’ll realise how rare this actu­ally is) and those of us who believe a manda­tory, opt-​​out clean feed is an issue that threat­ens civil lib­er­ties in this country.

My friend and col­league, Lau­rel Pap­worth also shares her views on the Time piece.